Eric Ries told me something very interesting in a two-part interview I did with him (part I, part II), which is a core principle of his “lean startup” methodology: why waste your time coding if you don’t even know if anyone is interested?

How do you know if anyone is interested?

Put up a website for your stealth startup and see if anyone signs up!

How do you do that? Use LaunchRock. Here CEO Jameson Detweiler shows me how it builds you a site that can do just that. And a bit more.

So, what does it do?

Well, it builds a great looking site for you to put onto Techcrunch and it keeps track of who signs up for your product and where they came from. Simple, huh? Yeah, but why not do that yourself?

Well, why waste time on setting up a mailing list, building a website, etc etc when you are in a race to get your core product done?

Highly recommended for startups.